macOS Needs Its Spaces Grid Back
Christian Inkster (Hacker News):
With the release of macOS Lion, Apple introduced Mission Control, its new take on virtual desktops that inexplicably restricted them to a horizontal line only. I remember thinking at first that I just hadn’t seen the setting somewhere, Apple wouldn’t just completely change how I used my computer right? right?
[…]
I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Alternative solutions popped up but the best of them Total Spaces caused me weird slowdowns and relied on modifying the system dock which was a no go once that eventually required bypassing system integrity protection.
[…]
That was until a couple of months ago, when I saw that someone had managed to remove the animation from macOS when you move from one space to another, without needing system edits. This animation clearly annoyed some people but never really bothered me. However as soon as I saw a space move without an animation I instantly realised I could solve my complaints.
[…]
I like the idea of a lightweight wrapper around the native spaces, with support for desktops or fullscreen apps. Just with a grid to navigate. But there is a reason pretty much all solutions that controlled native spaces died out. macOS keeps most of the mission control apis locked down. Its not simply a matter of calling a documented api to add a new desktop, or re-arrange them around. But the ability to move to a space instantly meant I could just create a model that took the single row native spaces and presented them like a grid.
He wrote an app called GridLion—and of course ran into lots of problems with permissions for accessibility and screen recording and is excluded from the Mac App Store.
Previously:
- Window Tiling and Snapping in Sequoia
- macOS Window Management
- Spaces, Apple’s Mostly Ignored macOS Productivity Feature
- Detecting Screen Recording Permission on Catalina
- Screen Recording in Big Sur Requires Admin Account
- Sequoia Screen Recording Prompts and the Persistent Content Capture Entitlement
- Spaces in 10.5.3
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"Apple wouldn’t just completely change how I used my computer right? right?"
Of course now we know they would, multiple times, totally unapologetically, along with every other major tech company. It's ridiculous that this sort of thing is normalized.
Imagine if every year the dashboard of your car pointlessly rearranged itself. Or your washing machine suddenly 'updated' and couldn't clean white clothes any longer? Or your screwdriver suddenly became unable to do anything with flat-head screws because they're so passé.
Why do tech companies think this sort of thing is acceptable or a good idea? (Rhetorical question, we know the answer, and it's the same process that drives enshittification.)
The grid was genuinely more usable than the horizontal strip — spatial memory meant you could navigate to Spaces by position without reading labels. Losing that in Lion was a significant regression that Apple never acknowledged.
With the grid gone, the identification problem got worse: in a horizontal row, all your Spaces look identical unless you memorize the order. And the order changes if you have "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" enabled (which is on by default).
I ended up building a tool to work around this — SpaceJump adds names, colors, and icons to each Space, visible in the menu bar. There's a fuzzy-search Quick Switcher (Cmd+0) that lets you jump by name rather than position, which sidesteps the horizontal-strip navigation problem entirely. It also does passive time tracking per Space with idle detection — an accidental feature that turned out to be useful.
It doesn't bring back the grid (I wish), but it at least makes the horizontal layout navigable by giving each Space a persistent identity you can search for. The complementary tools in this space: FlashSpace (free, open-source) bypasses native Spaces entirely with its own window-hiding system — no animations, fully configurable. Hyperjump is a newer app focused on naming and jumping. TotalSpaces was the gold standard for grid restoration but has been struggling with SIP/API restrictions in recent macOS versions, as you mentioned.
$9.99 one-time, 14-day trial at getspacejump.com. I'm the developer — built it out of the same frustration with post-Lion Mission Control.
